--- title: Steven D. Levitt and SuperFreakonomics | TIME description: Justin Fox meets Steven D. Levitt, the economics professor and co-author of SuperFreakonomics, the provocative followup to Freakonomics canonical: https://time.com/video/gWLNNlC4/ og:title: Steven D. Levitt and SuperFreakonomics og:description: Justin Fox meets Steven D. Levitt, the economics professor and co-author of SuperFreakonomics, the provocative followup to Freakonomics og:url: https://time.com/video/gWLNNlC4/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/gWLNNlC4/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Steven D. Levitt and SuperFreakonomics twitter:description: Justin Fox meets Steven D. Levitt, the economics professor and co-author of SuperFreakonomics, the provocative followup to Freakonomics twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/gWLNNlC4/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Steven D. Levitt and SuperFreakonomics > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Steven D. Levitt and SuperFreakonomics [Watch (HLS stream): Steven D. Levitt and SuperFreakonomics](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/gWLNNlC4.m3u8) (3:57)  _Published 2009-10-16. Justin Fox meets Steven D. Levitt, the economics professor and co-author of SuperFreakonomics, the provocative followup to Freakonomics_ --- Jul 27, 2023 1:14 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Best of 2015: Joseph Gordon-Levitt](/video/LHC8fD9k/) ### Best of 2015: Joseph Gordon-Levitt [Late-Night Highlight: Watch Joseph Gordon-Levitt Sing Rihanna On 'Tonight Show'](/video/eTpelarC/) ### Late-Night Highlight: Watch Joseph Gordon-Levitt Sing Rihanna On 'Tonight Show' [Late-Night Highlight: Joseph Gordon-Levitt Loves To Act With Fake Noses](/video/4EYngUW1/) ### Late-Night Highlight: Joseph Gordon-Levitt Loves To Act With Fake Noses --- ## Transcript >> I'm Justin Fox with TIME magazine, and I'm here in the Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park to observe a freakonomist in his natural habitat. This freakonomist is Steven Levitt, a professor at the University of Chicago. He has got a new book out called Get This Super Superfreakonomics, and now I'm gonna to go ring his super freaking doorbell. >> Hey! It's Jason. >> Good to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> Could you define superfreakonomics for me? >> Superfreakonomics is the application of economic way of thinking about the world, but to ask a few questions-- the kind of questions that regular economist wouldn't bother ask and whether it's about terrorist and trying to catch terrorists. It is hard to catch terrorist. Terrorists are very few. They're very well hidden. They're kind of dated. They're not keeping story. I think the approach that we've had actually have proved to be at least somewhat useful to people who are out there, as in their job trying to catch terrorists using very different approaches than what we use. And there are two things that might-- that might make people very mad. One is, in the first book, there was one line in the book, it was a total throw away, something I just happened to notice in the data where I said, and there is suggested evidence in the data that car seats actually are not that effective at saving kids lives. When you see car seat in a crash, meaning it is all-- I mean it's like all over the place, so I think in theory you can come up of reasons why car seats might be extremely dangerous. Like by elevating you up where stuff flying around it gets you into a more dangerous place. It's almost comical I think how poor the design solution is that goes with car seats, and then you back it up with the data and then you move on. That is a substrate book which will create enormous amounts of noise and zero progress. There will be no intelligent debate. I don't think-- I don't think that anything we do will change the way people think about that issue. We'll just make people angry. The other thing I think which would be controversial here, might be what we're doing on or our discussion of global-- global warming. Because it isn't the carbon that's the problem, it's the fact that we're heating up the earth, right? So if there are other ways that will allow us to produce just as much carbon, didn't require enormous behavioral change which is going to turn out to be incredibly costly, but to solve the problem some other way, we wouldn't wanna go after that. It's well understood that sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere has a cooling effect on the earth. It turns out that the amount of sulfur dioxide we need to get up to the stratosphere is so small that if you just took two big coal burning, plants-- electricity plants in China, and if you just extend their smoke stacks, you're going to start going up, you know, how many feet it does, you just put a big essentially like a Mylar balloon that extends the smoke stack up to the stratosphere, that's all you need to do. The third idea they have which his much more attractive to environmentalist. There are no-- There are essentially very few clouds over the oceans because there is nothing to seed the clouds. Simply clouds get seeded by sand and dust, a bit of salt can also seed the clouds. Okay. So I see as a problem for global warming is that the oceans are very dark. They absorb enormous amounts of heat and-- and if you could make them white covered with clouds, more of the light would be reflected, you just need to spray the salt water up in the air a little bit so you get solar powered little dinghies, that go around, with little motor around to spray the cells up and it makes enough clouds and this is a little more speculative than the other projects but I think there is every reason to think that you know, in a very, you know, cloudy, fluffy, happy way, we can solve global warming for less money than Al Gore's group does in the advertising each year trying to talk people into changing when no one's really doesn't seem to be listening very much. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Steven D. Levitt and SuperFreakonomics","description":"Justin Fox meets Steven D. 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